It’s been a while since the first interview with Ryan Harter, and today let’s continue the series with Jack Underwood.

Jack is a young indie developer that never say no to challenges – how do I know it? I previously worked with Jack for a couple of projects like Now Playing, Reverse Dictionary, and Today Calendar and Widget (pre-Material Design era), and we are really liking that push-and-pull interaction between us during the development.

In the first UI Animation in Photoshop tutorial, I have shown the way to do simple animations in Photoshop like moving, scaling and style changing – if you are new to this and haven’t check that out yet, I recommend you to look into Tutorial #1 before this.

In this second tutorial, I will share my experiences in applying easing into the animation made with Photoshop. Special thanks to Jovie Brett Bardoles for sharing his manual way of applying easing in his animations, which inspire me to explore and dig into the Timeline feature in Photoshop.

Designing for Android devices can be challenging sometimes due to the availability of the Android-powered devices with different screen sizes, however, it is certainly not an issue if adaptive design is considered during the design phase of the app. Some developer/company chose to complain about this, but this likely won’t change anything because it is a deliberate direction that Android meant to go and move forward. The way forward? It’s Adaptive Android Design1.

Why #AndroidDev Interview Series?

I think it’s no secret that my aim being a GDE is to help to close the gap between designer and developer in order to make awesome products, and as a designer, I always enjoy talking to Android Developer to get insights from them, especially indie developers since most of the time, they pretty much have to wear many different hats themselves in making their app a success in the Play Store.

Thus the idea making a series of interview with awesome Android Developers (especially indie developers) to peek inside their world, and their thoughts on design and designers (which is the insights that I truly appreciate), because I believe I will be able to learn something new from everyone of them with their unique experiences in Android development.

So for the first interview of the series, I proudly present Ryan Harter. I haven’t met Ryan until the recent GDE Summit (yes, he is an Android GDE!), and I definitely love talking to him and appreciate his passion towards Android development. Below is the quick and short email interview with him:

With the latest update in Material Design guideline, Google Design team has shared their design approaches on the product icon design – it’s a comprehensive and pretty complete icon design guideline (at least for me) and I believe many Android Designers are excited about it, that’s, of course, including me.

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After reading through the guideline, I wanted to try something out of it, and Unclouded (a Cloud Storage Management app developed by Christian Gollner and partially designed by me) came into my mind. So I looked at the current icon, and start imagining how it will look like in Material-style. And of course, to make sure the icon is properly sized, I first looked into the 4 suggested keyline shapes and determined that the horizontal rectangle is the right keyline shape to go. This is important because it will help to standardise all the launcher icons at the right size to achieve consistency in terms of visual alignment for the platform, yet unique with their silhouette.

Disclaimer: This post is mainly about the author rant about bad mobile app design from the largest bank in Malaysia, but it is also a great example of don’ts in mobile app design.

It’s September 2014. Material Design was introduced few months ago during Google I/O 2014. The predecessor – Holo Design was introduced late 2011 together with the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), which is about 2-3 years ago, and it’s getting matured as time goes. It’s probably not wrong to expect any Android apps published in the year 2014 embraced with all the lessons that we have learnt in Holo Design and craft the best Android experiences for the user.

Last week, they have officially launched their revamped mobile banking app, claiming that it has the best mobile banking experience compared to the previous version. It does seems to have a refreshed design – except it’s probably one of the worst and most unacceptable mobile design that I ever seen. And it’s 2014.

I have been using Photoshop to make UI animations for my work and it works surprisingly well (at least for me). Of course, Adobe After Effect is still the best tool to create complex and awesome animations, but with Photoshop, you can still create some simple and high quality UI animations to preview the animation idea to others. With some combination of animation properties, you can definitely create some rich animations that is sufficient for discussion. There are certain limitations in Photoshop compared to After Effects (of course!), but for someone who wanted to just use one tool for UI Design + simple UI Animations, Photoshop is one of the best tool that you can get (even if it’s not really designed for UI design).

This tutorial #1 will cover some basic procedures to create simple animations using the Timeline feature in Photoshop CS6+ (no GIMP or older Photoshop), so if you are totally new to this, I hope you will find this tutorial helpful for your first step in making UI animation using Photoshop. Let’s begin!